By Toye Olori
LAGOS, Jun 24 2002 (IPS)

Parents in Nigeria have urged government to prosecute police officers that deliberately shoot school children at roadblocks in Lagos, the country’s commercial hub.

They also have demanded that the government scrap the special “Operation Fire For Fire” squad set up by Nigeria’s Police chief to curb armed robbery in Nigeria.

The squad has been blamed for much of the killings in Lagos.

“Policemen, who kill innocent people, should be prosecuted and executed, if this indiscriminate killings must stop,” says Sam Ibe, a parent. “We pay the police to do the job of protecting us; they are not doing us a favour. The guns given to them are meant to protect us not to kill us.”

Mary, another parent, notes “since police officers have been ordered to stop collecting bribe from motorists, they have resorted to using their guns on innocent civilians.”

She says, “the excuse often cited by police officers that drivers refuse to stop (at roadblocks) is not tenable at all. When you flag down a vehicle and the driver refuses to stop, why not shoot the tyres, why shoot the occupants on the head? This is barbaric.”

The latest killings, which happened Saturday afternoon, occurred nine days after the murder of a 15-year-old female student, Oluwatosin, on Jun 14.

Two undergraduate students were murdered at a police checkpoint at Ikoyi, a posh suburb of Lagos, on Saturday. Ikoyi had been regarded a secure suburb of Lagos not often frequented by armed robbers.

The fatal weekend incident occurred after a student, who was driving the vehicle, dropped off his sister in school some 30 kilometres away. On his way home he gave a lift to four school friends and had gone to drop one of them at Falomo, a suburb of Ikoyi, when the police stopped them at a checkpoint.

“We immediately parked off the road side but to our shock, one of the policemen rushed towards the car and opened fire killing the two boys in front. When I saw blood on my face I realised that the two boys have been shot on the head. Before we could get out the vehicle, the policemen had disappeared,” one of the survivors narrated on a private television station Sunday night.

Commercial bus operators have often complained about police harassment, especially on the eight-kilometre road between Lagos and Ogun states in South-western Nigeria, where Oluwatosin was shot dead after the conductor of a bus on which she was travelling refused to pay the police a two-cent bribe.

But, the police say the roadblocks are necessary to monitor armed robbers and car-jackers sneaking into neighbouring Benin Republic. The checkpoints have, however, turned out to be a nuisance to commuters, motorists and commercial vehicle operators who have to bribe to get free passage.

“It doesn’t matter if the commercial vehicle has particulars or not, once you are stopped, you have to bribe (the police), if not you will be delayed. Our work doesn’t allow for delays because we have to deliver (the daily take) to the vehicle owner every evening. That is why we pay the bribe,” says Baba Sahid, a bus driver in Lagos.

Segun Jegede of the Lagos-based Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR) says “the killing shows that we are still not out of the woods. It is a further testimony that we have not moved from the despotic past of military rule. It’s a shame we lay claim to democracy while the government is busy putting in place ‘Operation Fire for Fire’ in the police force, to harass innocent citizens”.

Nigeria, with a population of about 120 million, returned to civil rule in 1999 after years of military rule.

But the return to multiparty democracy has not ended extra-judicial killings in Nigeria. The Lagos-based Committee for the Defence of Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation, has documented a number of such murders. They include the “May 3, incident in which “46-year-old Mufutau Ajibade Shittu, a Senior Inspector with the First Bank of Nigeria PLC was shot and killed by two policemen on the pretext that he was a robber.”

Shittu, who had gone to audit books in Kogi State, had retired to a hotel to spend the night when he met his death.

Another victim, Adewale Afolayan, a driver at the University of Lagos, was shot dead, while returning to his residence, for refusal to pay a 20-Naira bribe (20 cents).

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